While everyone from consumers to businesses to government is hoping for economic recovery, a consistent move to the upside has not been seen. Employment appears to be a difficult problem to solve.
“The Fed and private economists are trying to answer the bigger question of why the labor market shed 8.4 million jobs during this recession. Although the downturn was the deepest since the Great Depression, the job losses were even more severe than most forecasters had predicted based on models that compare economic growth and employment. Bernanke offered two possible explanations. ”One is that maybe the recession was deeper than we thought,” he said.
Another reason that the economy appears better than it actually is could be that consumers are working for free. The Baltimore Sun article advises Americans to “..suspect the official economic statistics peddled by Washington. American workers boosted their hourly production per person by a phenomenal annual rate of 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter, if you believe this month’s Labor Department figures. But if the bean counters measured all the off-the-clock work that companies are foisting on their customers, the national performance might be a lot less impressive.”
What does he mean?
“Companies are asking, ‘How do we get consumers to do more work for us – for free?’ ” says Kent Grayson, an associate professor of marketing at Northwestern University. “And ‘How do we attract consumers that actually enjoy doing that extra work?’ But on the other side, they’re also asking, ‘How do we save on customer-service costs?’ One way to do that of course is to ask consumers to do more work.”
“The communications revolution seems to have pushed prosumption to a new height. It’s not just data entry, typesetting and bar-code scanning that have been taken over by unpaid or poorly paid consumers.
At National Instruments, based in Austin, Texas, nearly half the company’s research and development is done by customers collaborating in online communities, says Grayson, who has written about the prosumer movement.
Moms in Procter & Gamble’s Vocalpoint Web community hawk the company’s products in return for coupons. At Threadless.com, customers design T-shirts, Grayson says.”
Grayson rejects the idea that computers, the Web and cell phones have drastically boosted overall prosumption. Even as companies dished off some tasks to unpaid consumers, he says, they took other tasks over.
“Twenty-five or 30 years ago, there wasn’t the option to get premade Toll House cookies,” he says. “Or dough. We had to make our own dough. But now there are companies that do it for us. So who knows what the actual trade-off is? But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a wash.” “Verizon signed me up as a broadband network technician. When the router or modem goes out on my Internet service (rare, it’s true), the guy who fixes it is me. I’m a data-entry clerk for Capital One. They make me key in my card number and other stuff when I call so they don’t have to. I check myself in for Southwest flights and serve as my own teller at M&T’s money dispenser. What’s next, running a cash register? Oh, yeah – I do that for Home Depot.”
